Any questions?

answers your education queries

THE headteacher of the excellent Nottinghamshire primary school of which I am a governor wants us to buy 20 laptop computers at a cost, including the central server, of £30,000. That's a huge sum to meet out of a school budget and, as there seems to be little government help available, we're having to consider a major fund-raising effort. But is this the right direction to take?

No. The facts are these: on average, primary schools have 18 computers each; nearly all are desktops; nearly half are more than three years old; the cost works out at £8,300 per school, 40 per cent of which comes from school budgets, 30 per cent from the Standards Fund, and much of the rest from parents. The subjects in which they are used most are English and maths, the aim being "to enhance learning". In my view, primary school pupils should be introduced to computers; the machines can be especially useful for teaching remedial literacy and numeracy; otherwise, they are an elaborate distraction. You should encourage your headteacher to scale down her ambitions.

In your account last week of the new-style A-levels, you omitted the most important fact of all: the impact they're having on the time available for teaching and learning. My son, who is a pupil at a leading independent school, is taking four subjects this year. Together, they comprise 15 modules. Because of the time taken to examine them, the school will stop teaching after Easter. It will do the same in his second year, when he'll be taking three subjects. Result: over the two years, he'll be taught for just four terms out of six. Where's the sense in that?

There is none. But is such an arrangement common? I would be grateful to hear from others.

Is the gap between girls' and boys' achievements at GCSE the same at all levels of ability and in all types of schools?

No. The gap is widest among the least academically able. This year's figures for the proportions passing at least five GCSEs at grades A to C showed that the gap was 12.5 percentage points at secondary modern schools (girls, 40.5 per cent; boys, 28 per cent); 10.7 points at comprehensives (girls, 51.5 per cent; boys, 40.8 per cent); and only 1.5 points at grammar schools (girls, 97.5 per cent; boys, 96 per cent). Perhaps there is a ceiling effect? In the independent sector, the gap was 6.7 percentage points (girls, 84.6 per cent; boys, 77.9 per cent). Incidentally, the proportions who passed English, maths, dual-award science and a modern language - the true measure of five-subject GCSE achievement - were 35 per cent of girls and 25 per cent of boys, or 30 per cent overall.

That is significantly lower than the 49 per cent the Government likes to trumpet, which represents a rather less testing collection of subjects.

How much pressure are schools under to turn their pupils into good little Europeans?

Jack Lang, the French education minister, has just been outlining the programme for the current six months of the French presidency of the European Union: "It is our responsibility to secure the psychological and intellectual foundations of political Europe. It is up to each member state to create within its frontiers a new state of mind which will make our citizens, from their most tender age, European citizens."

So if schools (and nurseries?) are not under pressure yet, it looks as if they soon will be.